How to Create a Committee Meeting Devotion in 30 Minutes

I’ve written this post for everyone who has agonized over the task of leading a committee in its opening devotion.

I’ve watched church members perform this task hundreds of times.  We all feel that our tank of inspiration is close to empty when it’s our turn to lead the group’s opening devotion.  It’s a scary assignment to speak about God.  We have our own prayers, our own relationship with God, our convictions about what the Christian life is.  But to be confident enough to urge others in a way that is both responsible to the truth and inspiring for others just feels like a risky assignment.

Most of the time devotion leaders play it safe and rely on a short passage from a favorite devotional book.  We google something.  We rely on someone who supposedly knows how to do this better.

The best devotions are those that come naturally from our own personality and speak specifically about the situation of your group.   When we create something with a particular group of people in mind, we are daring to let the Bible speak directly to the tasks that are on the agenda or on their minds.  No pre-packaged devotional can do that.

This post will provide an outline for a 5-minute devotion that begins with a Bible lesson and ends with a prayer.  It will suggest how to choose a passage from the Bible.  It will provide an outline, which poses four questions for the devotion leader.  His or her response to these questions will constitute the body of what you say when your time comes in the course of the committee meeting, usually at the beginning.  The closing prayer will ask God to enable the committee members to behave in a new way in the light of what the Bible is asking of them.

The process of creating this devotion should take around 30 minutes.

The Preparation in Three Steps

• Choosing the Bible lesson
• Creating the  devotion’s structure:

This approach came from Paul Scott Wilson, who is Professor of Homiletics at Emmanuel College of the University of Toronto. He wrote one of the most useful books on preaching that I’ve read: The Four Pages of the Sermon   I’ve written hundreds of sermons based on the Four Pages method and I’m adapting it here as a guide to creating meeting devotions.

The devotion is structured around four questions

1. What is the trouble in the Bible passage?
2. What is a similar trouble in our situation?
3. What is the grace that is a solution to the trouble in the Bible passage?
4. What is the grace that is a solution to the trouble in our situation?

• Writing the Closing Prayer

Choose the Bible Lesson

This guide assumes that what your committee holds the Bible in high esteem.  Whatever you say about the chosen biblical passage will be supported by the fundamental truth and beauty of the Word of God.

Sometimes devotional books, sayings or clichés, internet forwards or stories, which may not be rooted in the world of the Bible, are captivating when we first read them.  Someone comes up with an idea, shares it, and it propagates itself through social media and word of mouth. It feels quite wise and we find ourselves repeating it.  “I want to be spiritual, not religious.”  “I’m too blessed to be depressed.” “Teach a man to fish…feed him for a lifetime.”  “When God closes a door, he opens a window.” “God helps those who help themselves.”  The problem with such ideas is that they are substitutes for fresh thinking.  They can also distort the Bible’s more elaborate truths.  Cliches and popular inspirational ideas can have a short blooming season or only feel inspiring to people in particular circumstances.  Imagine leading devotions in a county jail and saying, “Let go and let God.”

Almost anything from the Bible is energized with God’s wisdom and goodness.  I recommend that you put that energy to work as the power source for your devotional comments.  Not every passage lends itself to a 5-minute inspirational talk.  The situations underlying many stretches of the Old and New Testaments is complicated and requires sorting out before people can understand it clearly.

Here’s an example of a complicated section of the Bible that you will want to avoid:

In the book of Old Testament book of Job, the main character, who is stricken by an onrush of misfortune, is surrounded by well-meaning friends.  The friends turn out to be terrible counselors because their lengthy and flowery advice turns out to be roundabout ways of blaming Job for his own misery.  If you picked a verse or two out of one of these speeches you’d be creating a devotion out of something that sounded pious but which in context is terrible advice.

Choose something straightforward.  Virtually everything that Jesus says and does is useable.  John’s Gospel and the Beatitudes can be complex.  Old Testament history is loaded with inspirational nuggets.  Short passages from Paul’s letters or even single verses can be a well of meaningful ideas.  Choose a passage that has spoken to you in the past or something that is bugging you to notice it.

Keep your passage as short as possible, a few verses at most.  Don’t try to read the whole narrative of David slaying Goliath or the seafaring adventure at the end of Acts.

You may be lucky and have an assigned text.  If your meeting takes place at Easter or Christmastime, consider a seasonal passage.  Some of the liturgical year’s lesser observances can provide great devotional texts.  Your inspirational moment at the beginning of a meeting will be a hit if you could start out saying, “Did anyone remember that today is Transfiguration?”  The best place to get oriented on the Christian calendar and Bible lessons associated with the Christian year is here.

For the sake of this write-up, I’m going to pick the well-known passage of Jesus blessing the children, found at Mark 10.13-16.  For the committee, I’ll select a business-oriented group, the church’s bequests and endowment committee.  The image of Jesus blessing the children inserted into a committee of financial planners sounds challenging.

Let’s see how it might work.

Work on the Worksheet’s Four Questions.

First: What is the trouble in the Bible passage?

This first question forces you to press your thinking into a problem-solution framework.  Usually, the trouble or problem is some kind of human shortcoming.  Another way of approaching this question is to ask why our Christian forebears went to so much trouble to get this little episode to us.  Why did someone remember this when Jesus did so many things that were not remembered?  Why did Jesus’ followers write it down, protect it, copy and re-copy it?   Why is this passage in the Bible?

In our chosen example, there appears to be some kind of problem with the disciples’ attitude.  They are behaving like Elvis’ bodyguards, clearing a path through the crowd for their rock star to move through.

You might be tempted to focus on the pastel images of Jesus surrounded by well-behaved, White children, which decorate the walls of Sunday School classrooms.  Jesus loves the little children!  Jesus love for kids, however, is not a problem.  It’s what everybody expects of Jesus.

The trouble is in the disciples’ outlook.  They assume here that Jesus is too busy to be wasting time in the manner depicted by the Sunday school pictures.  Maybe Jesus is thinking about the Kingdom of God’s rollout and can’t fuss with a bunch of kids.

A quick glance fore and aft of this passage confirms our decision locate the trouble in the disciples’ assumptions about what is important to their Lord.  In almost every episode leading up to this scene with the children, disciples appear to be working out of a value system different from that of Jesus.

So, what is the trouble in this particular episode?  The disciples don’t understand what and who is important to God.

Second: What is a similar trouble in our situation?

It’s important to remember that neither the gospel writer Mark nor any of the biblical authors wrote with us in mind.  The text is not God’s direct revelation to the Endowment and finance committee to “let the children come to me, do not hinder them…” There is a difference between what an episode meant in Bible times and what it might mean now.  It might mean any number of things.

Here’s one possible tack.

A financially-oriented committee may be conducting its business under the sway of the values of exclusion, efficiency, or self-importance.   Sometimes such groups tie up monies by placing them in long-term non-liquid investments so they won’t be available for mission projects.  Endowment and finance groups in churches may be particularly beholden to large dollar donors and eager to do their bidding.  The composition of the committee itself may have an elitist tone.  It may be filled with money-oriented bankers, investment professionals, and wealthy individuals.

A courageous leader of the devotions will want to name ways that the committee’s work bears a resemblance to the original disciples scolding young mothers with babies in arms.  Some powerful questions to speak

aloud: “Who might feel rebuked by our work?”  “What in our sphere of influence might feel insignificant because of who we are or what we’re doing?”  “Where might we be getting in the way of something that God is doing in our world?”

Third: What is the grace that is a solution to the trouble in the Bible passage?

Another way to ask this question is to ask how is God’s intervention in the Bible story a way of overcoming the human weakness at the heart of the trouble.

The action of Jesus in our sample passage is twofold.  He takes time, wastes time, with the children, doing little more than blessing them and expressing his love for them.  But before he gets to this tender scene, Jesus expresses his disapproval of the disciples’ attitude.   The grace of God can take the form of a scolding or the showing of divine displeasure.  The shepherd loves the sheep with both a staff and a rod, the former for rescuing, the latter for swatting.

We can state the third point in a sentence or two.  God’s love sometimes takes the form of a scolding.  The disciples may feel a bit foolish while Jesus laughs with a bunch of little kids.  Nevertheless, the little ones are closer to his heart.  The disciples need to adjust their value system.

Fourth: What is the grace that is a solution to the trouble in our situation?

This is the place to say something bold about what God might be doing at this very moment.  Question two leads you to acknowledge how you and others in the group may be falling short.  At that point, you acknowledged your human weakness and inability to be saints.  In question two you acknowledged some limitations in your thinking.

Now with this last question you’re in a position to say how God’s love is overcoming that limitation.  Maybe God’s Spirit is holding you back from a mistake that the disciples actually made.  Maybe the grace of the Bible lesson can be a divine light that will illuminate all of the decisions your committee will make at its meeting.

The Endowment Committee may be experiencing a humbling situation where they feel a bit defeated.   Maybe Church’s governing board has overridden one of their decisions.  Maybe the proposal for the congregation to build a Habitat House, despite the fact that its expense forces the church to unwisely spend out of its cash reserves, is God’s grace-filled rebuke of the financial group.  Maybe the Bible lesson about the self-important disciples serves as a warning for committee members to not go and do likewise.

Compose a two or three sentence prayer

The prayer flows out of the rest of what has been said.  It is a request that the grace which overcame the problem in the Bible lesson will overcome the same kind of problem in this committee meeting.

Using our sample Bible story and devotion the prayer might look like this:

Dear God, your love and tender care, even for those who we dismiss, is greater than we usually think.  At this moment bring into our thoughts how you are gently correcting our attitudes, especially those attitudes toward people we hold as insignificant.  Hold us back from arrogance.  Let our decisions in this hour be in accord with the mind we see in Jesus.  We pray in his name.  Amen.